The Pomp Podcast - Landon Cassill, Professional NASCAR Driver: How Buying Bitcoin Is Like NASCAR

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

Landon Cassill is a professional NASCAR driver and a Bitcoin and crypto enthusiast. In this conversation, Landon and Anthony Pompliano discuss what it's like growing up to race professionally, how he broke into NASCAR, what actually goes on inside the car during a race, how Landon got into crypto, and what he's currently doing in the space today. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Landon Castle is a professional NASCAR driver and Bitcoin and crypto enthusiast. In this conversation, we discuss what it is like growing up to race professionally, how he broke into NASCAR, what actually goes on inside the car during a race, how Landon got into crypto, and what he is currently doing in the space today. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Skrt, skrt!

Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that

through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. everything you could want at crypto.com go help your boy out tell him pomp sent you download the app or visit crypto.com pomp's got you always ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how don't worry your boy pomp's got you everybody got some electricity and wi-fi all you got to do is go to coinmine.com you buy a coin mine it's like an xbox or a playstation that helps you turn your electricity into bitcoin that's right you purchase it it shows up at your doorstep you pull it out of the box you plug it in connect to your wi-fi five minutes or less you're mining bitcoin all you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide and then you receive over-the-air

updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis kind of like how tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software just you're updating your coin mine consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to coinmine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check

out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, that's BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm sitting here with Landon. We are in Las Vegas for a few conferences, but I wanted to sit down real quick and talk. Landon and I have actually known each

other for a while now. And I think that the secret is kind of out that you're into crypto, Bitcoin, et cetera. But I figured we'd sit down and actually talk about it. Was it a secret? Is there ever a secret? Well, listen. For some people, it might be a secret. You're a professional athlete, so I don't know if secrets are allowed in professional sports. I don't think it has to be a secret. If there's anybody out there that's keeping it a secret that you're in crypto, if you're an athlete, I don't think you need to come on out of the closet.

To hide it? Yeah, it doesn't have to be hidden. All right. Let's start kind of early, early on, right? So pretty much everyone in racing seems to start when they're like a little kid and there's this whole kind of series of leagues and all the stuff that you kind of work your way up to NASCAR or other racing leagues. Did you do that and kind of where did you grow up and what was your path into all this? Yeah, I mean, there's really no definitive path to NASCAR. It's not like the NFL or NBA where it's pretty obvious that you start out in a peewee football or basketball

ball and play in high school and college um in motorsports you can there's a lot of different forms of motorsports that you can start out in and it can take you to a lot of different places i mean there's drivers that might start out thinking they're going to go indycar racing and end up going nascar racing or vice versa um i'm and for those that don't know just separate out at kind of the professional level there's indycar which is more open wheel type racing Indy 500 NASCAR is Stock car racing, cars with fenders

Daytona 500 Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon, Jimmy Johnson Landon Castle Landon Castle, yes I'm from Iowa, I'm from Cedar Rapids, Iowa and dirt racing is a huge thing in Iowa but I didn't actually grow up dirt racing

because I raced in go-karts, which is pretty typical for kids between the ages of 4 and 12 and I had really raced a lot in go-karts by the time I was 12 years old and I was kind of ready to get into full-size cars and my dad 12 yeah my dad didn't want to get you know stuck racing go-karts for too long and there the dirt tracks in Iowa wouldn't allow me to race until I was 16 so there's one asphalt track in Cedar Rapids Iowa my hometown called Hawkeye Down Speedway

and um they allowed me to race um when i was 12 to 14 years old in their full-size cars so that's how i started racing on asphalt on pavement um even though i was kind of heading down a dirt racing path um and from there um there was a touring series in full-bodied cars that look similar to a nascar type race car um that was traveling the country and they allowed 14 year drivers so when i was 14 i started traveling the country racing in what was called the asa late model series okay so at 12 years old uh i couldn't even reach the foot pedals i don't think like like what is it like being 12 and you know your dad saying to you hey you're gonna get a real car yeah you're gonna drive on the pavement and i'm assuming you're competing against like

older teenagers or adults how fast are these things going uh the the first full-size car that i drove was a um what's called an imca modified so it's an open wheel car it kind of it doesn't look like an indie car but but to someone that doesn't know anything about racing you might think it's closer to an indie car than it is a stock car but uh the the front suspension and the frame itself is like an old uh monte carlo um it just doesn't have a body on it just doesn't have fenders and it had about 400 horsepower and weighed 2500 pounds and um i was 12 and i weighed about 100 pounds and i was racing against adults yeah and it was um um it was quite an experience it's you know at that age you make a lot of mistakes and um the mistakes have bigger

penalties than than when you're racing a go-kart and my dad you really had a policy from the time i started racing that he would support the best you know in the ways that he could support um but i had to fix whatever i crashed so uh growing up starting in those modifieds racing and late models now you have a car that has fenders on it it's a little bit easier to lean into people maybe crash someone uh whether it's on accident or on purpose um my dad would pay for it but i had to to physically fix it myself very cool so that kind of taught me uh from a young age how to how to take care of my equipment yeah and probably uh i don't want to crash because i want to fix it attitude? There was one time that I had an incident with another driver that was pretty

intentional on my part in retaliation. And it caused some damage to my car. And I was 16 and my dad made me pay for it. And that was, I didn't have any money. So it was like a couple thousand dollars. And I had to pretty much use my winnings that I had been earning to pay for the wrecked car so i learned my lesson yeah and so at 12 to 14 how fast do those cars go uh about at the track that i was racing on about 100 110 miles an hour at 12 years old you're going 110 miles an hour yeah yeah mid-corner speeds probably 60 miles an hour um i mean you're talking about like i said 400 horsepower you you're you know full throttle down the straightaways you're driving it into the corner you have to lift you have to use a lot of brake pressure um you know you have to control

the car from sliding and spinning out and you have to try to maneuver your way around other other cars it's not just pushing the gas down and being flat out yeah the whole track i can't imagine going 110 driving a stick shift with a clutch and everything yeah wow all right and then the nascar stock cars that you drive today um those go like what 220 uh i have gone 220 in a nascar race car um it's at this point in nascar it really depends on the aero package that nascar and the the rules limitations that we have the fastest i've gone is that michigan international speedway i've gone over 220 miles an hour when we had 900 horsepower and and small spoilers so the cars didn't have a lot of drag and i mean that's just that's just you're just carrying a

lot of speed and it's um for a 3 000 pound car um that's pretty fast it's hard on the tires it's hard on equipment to go that fast right now our cars go about 200 miles an hour we race this weekend at texas motor speedway our cars will go about 200 miles an hour and um i mean our mid corner speeds at texas will be 175 180 miles an hour wow so on the straightaways you'll hit on average let's say about 200 miles an hour but into those corners and turns it's really not that big of a difference i mean 20 miles an hour is 20 miles an hour but it's not like you're going from 200 and breaking down to 150 particularly at texas this weekend that's because of our aero package we have a really big spoiler our cars make a lot of downforce and uh when we have fresh new tires

on the car uh the weather's going to be cool this weekend uh one end of the racetrack turn three and four has a lot of banking to it and we can run wide open through that corner without lifting so So, you're talking about, you know, at the end of the back stretch, we're, you know, almost 190, almost 200 miles an hour, and you're not lifting. So, mid-corner speeds are pretty high. Wow. You're pulling two or three Gs through the corner. Going 200 miles an hour is one thing. Going 200 miles an hour through a turn is crazy.

It's not that bad. You know, our cars are built to go that fast, so they handle fairly well. At times they don't, you know, and that's all relative to your competitors. But, you know, they're supposed to go that fast. So it's harder to drive them at 140 miles an hour because they're not making downforce. They're not making grip at 200 miles an hour. That's how fast they want to go. The real problem is when they have to stop all of a sudden.

Yep. That's usually when bad things happen. For sure. And so let's go back to you. So you're like 16, right? 14, 16. You start touring. You're still in school, obviously.

So you're like have kind of two lives, it almost feels like. I'm assuming most kids at school think it's pretty cool that you're driving 100 miles an hour on the weekends. How do you get from that to NASCAR? What does that path look like once you kind of realize, hey, I want to go do this professionally? What does that look like? So fortunately for me during that time period and during that age, the path that we were racing and the touring series that we were racing was a really good path to get to NASCAR. The teams that were flush with money, the manufacturers that had a lot of money to spend on driver development, on young driver development, they were looking at asphalt late model racers, which is what I was doing, as the next drivers. There's been, like I said, where I mentioned earlier the multiple different paths.

You have dirt racers and sprint car drivers, people that race in sports cars and road courses. They can all kind of end up in the same place. But that was a time period where the two most prevalent types of drivers were coming from open wheel midgets and sprint cars on dirt and late models, asphalt late models. So by the time I was 16 years old, well, by the time I was 15, 16 years old, I had been scouted by an agent. I had been signed to an agency and I was racing 60, 70 times a year. And I signed a contract. I actually did a sort of an audition. it was kind of like a gong show audition uh with with chevrolet with um 16 other drivers and um

they all put us in race cars and we showed our stuff in front of each other for for and like went on three different tests we didn't race but it was a test so you drove by yourself on the track you had to race you had to drive the car for a certain period of time they took a lot of notes they they looked at your data the car was outfitted with telemetry so they looked at your driving style they listen to your feedback and um i mean there are some pretty impressive drivers that were in that test joey logano who's the nascar champion was in that test um he actually was the the number one ranked driver that came out of that test and had a contract with joe gibbs racing uh from there and there was a chevy team at the time um i was the number two ranked driver

out of that test and i got a contract with hendrick motorsports um out of that test ryan hunter ray indy 500 champion was in that test so there was some big names back then this was over this is 12 13 years ago so um but like i said i got a contract with hendrick motorsports became a test driver for hendrick tested jimmy johnson's cars jeff gordon's cars uh how old are you when this is going on i was 17 so you're 17 and still in school but also being a test driver for these guys you've got to be like these dudes are legends so i actually finished i was i'm young for my grade i was i'm i graduated high school when i was 17 and um so this all was kind of happening in my senior going into my senior year of high school and i had

enough credits that i um was able to finish high school uh in my after my first semester and senior year senior year i did the same thing yep and so i moved to north carolina with my grandma um and her and i lived together for the first three or four years um me racing professionally and so uh the the timing all worked out where my contract with hendrick came up at the exact same time that i was finishing high school that's awesome and so you you know go from literally in the cafeteria at high school to all of a sudden now you're test driving jeff gordon's cars uh for hendrick motorsports yeah what are you doing on a day-to-day basis and are you kind of like starstruck at the time or are you like hey i'm trying i'm here to kind of you know get into

yeah these nascar races and start winning races i was pretty starstruck at the time i mean my first imagine one of my first jobs at hendrick uh was to drive uh jeff gordon's daytona 500 primary car for 2007 uh at a straight line test so we used to go to proving grounds uh where there They had runways, basically, with several miles of straight lines, and you would take the car and you'd drive it in a straight line as fast as it would go, and they would collect aero data, and that's how they would build their aero maps for their simulation models. Wow. One of my first jobs was to drive his primary car for the upcoming Daytona 500.

And now, in those large teams, a driver has different cars for different races, or are they taking one car and for each race they're actually changing the aerodynamics and the different components of it, but it's the same car and kind of chassis and just changes per race? At that time, it was different cars for different races, and it's still that way now. NASCAR has—the rules have kind of adapted to where NASCAR has really tried to make it to where you can run the same car as many times as possible, but ultimately there's there's no spending cap and there's no limit on the car there's no vin

number right that that nascar tracks there's no limit on how many times you can run a car and the biggest teams that have the biggest budgets what they're really doing is is building um cars and and when i say cars chassis and bodies right so you have the chassis which is sort of the mechanical side of it and then the body which is the aero side of it um those cars are unique to pretty much each racetrack so they might have a chassis configuration with an aero configuration that works at five or six different tracks they have a chassis configuration and aero configuration that works at two or three other tracks that are similar to each other um they probably have anywhere from nine to ten different iterations over the 38 race schedule that we have so um a lot

of what that testing that I did was developing the, um, the different arrow maps and, uh, the simulation models for them to, to research those cars, to build those cars. Uh, I mean, the biggest race teams, they're manufacturing companies. So, um, it's a, it's a huge, there's a huge facility to build the research and build these cars. So I want to talk a little bit about, um, and you've been kind enough to kind of give me the crash course on racing really comes down to money, right and money meaning um the team structures are uh very unique in that unlike other sports as you mentioned there's no spending caps there's no kind of like salary cap type there's no driver's union yeah yeah and so um help me understand that there's like kind of

large cap teams i'll call them or large teams and there's a smaller uh more budget type teams um on the large team side most of these are car manufacturers or have some relationship with a car manufacturer talk a little bit about how that manufacturing relationship works and then how does that trickle down into the the hardware or the actual yeah um you know car they can put on the track and the advantages that brings by them having access that cap yeah so so that's a that's one of my most exciting things to talk about right now in nascar and the the the initial conversation paints a little bit of a bleak picture of how our sport works and then the the um the light at the end of the tunnel is where the sport is headed so i'll walk you through that right now you have

the biggest teams right now like hendrick motorsports um joe gibbs racing um rcr stewart haas and those teams are supported by the big auto manufacturers toyota ford chevrolet now those teams also have the biggest sponsorships they're the most well-funded they have the best talent the best leadership the best engineering the best drivers and nascar has a rule book that we have to abide by when we build our race cars but ultimately even though those rule books have the rule book has really tight tolerances we're still responsible for building and manufacturing and designing our cars to fit those tolerances so each team even multiple different chevy teams right the car that i drive is a chevy and the car that hendrick motorsports

building is a chevy each team is responsible for their own manufacturing process and they're responsible for their own proprietary components so right now the biggest teams are able to take this support that they get from the manufacturers which is money engineering support you know you have a manufacturer like toyota they write a check to the teams but they also have their own engineering facilities where they provide wind tunnel testing and chassis engineering and all in research and development support those those teams are building race cars from scratch they're building chassis from scratch we don't buy them from anywhere they're building them from scratch they're building the bodies they're taking the cars to the wind tunnel

they're they're rnd in those bodies they're they're honing them in even if it's to the thousands of an inch they're building they have engineering teams um that are building simulation so these cars are um uh i mean it's machine learning is a big thing that in for for the big manufacturers because it feels like there's a lot of data that goes into this right like it almost feels like it's an iterative process very similar like software development where you say all right we have uh kind of our first guess so we're going to put that into the chassis and And they're constantly reiterating it. They're constantly relearning and then going back to the manufacturing plant,

which they own or they develop, and remanufacturing new parts and pieces. So those are the teams that are having the most success. The challenge for the smaller teams in the sport right now are that it is so hard to catch up with that, especially when those big teams are subsidized by the auto manufacturers because those auto manufacturers are not subsidizing the smaller teams like they are the big teams. So if you're a small team coming into the sport, it's actually more cost-effective for you to just go to one of those big teams and pay them a licensing fee to use their technology. Got it.

So the big team takes the resources from the auto manufacturer plus whatever else they have and sponsorships, et cetera. They're able to iterate faster. They, in theory, get better technology, et cetera. Which is okay, right? It's a competition sport. We want to create a competitive advantage. Yep. The flaw in that is that they're taking that competitive advantage and they're able to sort of suppress their competition by selling whatever it is, however much they want, of their technology back to their competition.

Got it. So then they take that. Let's say that they've made a car that goes at a certain track 215 miles an hour. They could technically sell to a competing team technology that makes the car go 205 miles an hour, right? And that competing team may or may not understand that they're buying kind of inferior technology or configuration. And the team that is – the larger team that's been subsidized and has the capital, they're kind of making that decision. It sounds like there's not that much transparency into this, et cetera. Is that accurate?

Well, I mean there's – it depends on the individual relationships with the larger teams and the smaller teams. I mean, there's plenty of cases I would imagine where there isn't much transparency and the bigger team is charging the smaller team a lot of money and the smaller team may or may not know if they're getting the most updated parts or the most updated technology. Or let's just say, instead of making assumptions, let's just say in the most authentic way, the big team that has 600 employees and spends $30 million per car that they field is sharing all of their information with the smaller team that's paying for this information. Well, that smaller team with lesser employees, even with all that information, still lacks the manufacturing capabilities and and the manpower to keep up with the iterations that the big team has or is capable of right and then it also um they also those big teams

have leverage over those small teams to control the price of that licensing fee it's called a technical alliance in our business so technical alliance yep technical alliance so the big teams you know, if the small team, let's just, I mean, you could game theory this, right? I'm not making an assumption, but let's just game theory it. If a big team is selling a technical alliance to a small team and the small team ends up outrunning the big team, what are they going to do? They're going to jack up the price of their technical alliance, right? So it's, and the same goes with the engine business. The engine business is the same way. The big teams, Hendrick Motorsports, I mean, they own the engine business. So they own their engine business and they sell,

they lease the engines to the two smaller teams so um there's a lot of incentive for hendrick motorsports on the engine side of things to make sure that first of all they're getting the best engines that they can get um and then their customers they obviously need to build a quality product to their customers but um i mean they they control the price of they they control the price of their own customers cost to go racing through um through their engine leases so So that's the kind of interesting dynamic in the sport that makes it challenging for upward mobility in NASCAR for a team owner. The light at the end of the tunnel is that NASCAR is taking a serious move at changing that model. And where do they want to move to?

What does that new model look like, you think? NASCAR is really – they're not just looking at – they're making moves. And in 2021, we're going to be racing with a single-source manufactured race car. Oh, interesting. So everyone will use the same manufactured car. For all the cars, parts, and pieces, it'll be sourced from – or each piece that we have to buy will be sourced from the same place. Got it.

And can you make changes or adaptations or enhancements to those parts once you get them? or will it be almost the identical car for everyone? Right now, the spirit of the project is that it will all be identical, right? So our sport is competitive, and we're already tuned up with manufacturing plants, and we're already pretty savvy when it comes to looking at a part and saying, how can we improve this? So I can promise you that teams are going to look at parts that they're forced to buy, right? that we have to put on the car, and they're going to figure out a way to make it better within the rules, right?

So I would say that NASCAR still has a decision to make on how they're going to police that and how they're going to make sure that parts haven't been manipulated or compromised. And, you know, I would imagine there will be big penalties that come with that. NASCAR is probably going to be putting some sort of long-term freeze on the car so that the car can hold its value, right? So that you don't buy a car and race with it. And then six months later, there's all of a sudden a new car that we have to buy. And then they're also going to put a limit on how many cars you can own.

So you can't just buy 38 cars for all 38 races. You might have to buy seven cars and figure out a way to make it through the whole season with seven cars. Make it work. Got it. And this is very similar. So I don't think I've ever told this before, But I have someone that I know, a gentleman, Lucas Degrassi, who used to be a Formula 1 racer and then was part of and now races in Formula E. So it's open wheel racing for electric vehicles.

Yeah. And if I remember correctly, he had told me that Formula E, everyone uses the exact same car. Right. And so it's this idea that the advantage is not in the equipment. It's in who's behind the wheel. Right. And it makes it more competitive, and therefore, it actually makes it more entertaining. And not just who's behind the wheel, but who, because it's not all about the driver.

Even if you're in the same, even if everybody has the same car, the same hardware, you still have a race strategist. You still have general managers. You still have pit crews, right? So, like in Formula E, they have strategists, and it's about your communication with your team and how well you can step the car up and how well the driver can give feedback and build a car that's balanced for the race. And, you know, one of the questions that NASCAR has to answer to their manufacturers are where are you going to let the manufacturers compete, right?

If you're going to standardize every part and piece on the car, um you know there's still a huge marketing incentive for toyota to be the title sponsor of a race team because there's 70 million race fans and 5 million viewers on tv every week but i mean do you want to develop some technology in our sport and if you do where do you want to develop that technology yep right so like in formula e um the to my understanding the cars are standardized like you said but the manufacturers have some freedom to compete with each other in the drivetrain technology right got it formula e electric you know they're they're they're there's it's pretty reasonable for them to think

hey let's come in and use this motorsports platform as a way to help develop our our ev for sure technology speaking of that um nascar ever go electric you think what's kind of oh sure i think yeah i can see that i mean in right now the the first phase of this sort of single source manufactured model is is the cars and the bodies and the chassis and and actually they're they're looking at some sort of spending cap some sort of way to um keep the teams from just running away with their funding uh but the second phase of it is going to be the engine and the powertrain um and and they're looking at some sort of hybrid regenerative energy to use for um and conversations have been anything from a push to pass button like you've seen in indycar racing to

letting the cars run off of their electric power source under cautions so that maybe it's like a timeout during a basketball game where the stadium gets quiet and you can talk again and you can you know check your phone um it's just a lot of creative ideas but ultimately um i think nascar is very well aware of where the auto industry is going and where they could end up but it's hard to shake the idea of a v8 you know i was gonna say it feels like that's like nascar is like the ultimate american sport right and uh and having electric vehicles something about it does it feel right right and i'm not even a huge race fan but uh but obviously that's where the industry goes but see nascar has three major national series we have two series that race

cars that are actually pretty similar to each other the cup series and the xfinity series and the xfinity series is kind of like the feeder series to the cup series but ultimately the cars are kind of the same um and then we have a truck series right so it makes sense to have a truck series you know you're selling trucks on one end you're selling cars on the other end i and this is just me talking i'm not speaking for the sport but maybe the xfinity series someday could be the ev series right and that technology could be there and the cup series could be what it is want to know who has the best url crypto.com that's right crypto.com they're a crypto platform with one goal motherfucking mass adoption that's why we're all here we're trying to get crypto in

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Are we talking about, you know, half a billion dollars to like $5 million? Or is it, you know, much closer like $20 million to $10 million? You have cars at the very highest end probably spending a million per race on their program okay and there's 38 races 38 races yep and then on the very low end you probably have cars that spend a hundred thousand a race okay so 10x though yeah yeah pretty uh pretty big difference there yeah and um of the team sizes you said that some of the larger guys might have 600 employees yeah what does that look like on the

lower end so the the largest teams that those those that are spending a million a race probably are of that size um and a team that's spending a hundred thousand a race probably has anywhere from 10 to 25 employees got it okay so so again pretty material uh difference there um all right so you've been doing racing for a while yeah and uh you're into crypto yes so how how did you first hear about bitcoin uh crypto etc um and then what'd you do once you heard about it I first heard about it in 2013 and really through racing because in 2014, a good friend of mine, Josh Wise, who hopefully some listeners on this podcast know who Josh Wise is because he drove the Dogecoin-sponsored car a couple times in NASCAR. And the Dogecoin community on Reddit came together and crowdfunded sponsorship for a race car. And they even, believe it or not, as crazy as it is, and this is why the Internet is undefeated,

they crowdfunded the fan vote to get him into the All-Star race. Really? And they beat Danica Patrick to get Josh into the All-Star race. Josh is a very close friend of mine and um I was I was you know really shotgun with him through this whole process um because how much did they have to uh crowdfund to get the sponsorship I think they raised six figures um over the course of all of the stuff that they did I think they spent they doge the community came up with a hundred thousand dollars at least wow yeah so and it was a it was a huge impact on his team at the time I mean his team had no sponsorship

and they filled some major gaps in the schedule and it was really good for josh you know yeah so uh i was really i loved it i was super into it and and um that was my first intro to cryptocurrency and i've never had anyone come on it's the first time i introduced was the dogecoin yeah well i mean look man it's that honestly that that that's just proves to you the uh uh the power of energy and positive energy and community which is is the maybe one of the core tenets of uh of crypto right now one of the foundations that's that that keeps it together uh but for me i um you know once i've once i understood you know my first impression of bitcoin was this this you know online money right and and i didn't really get it but once i understood the financial sovereignty side of it

I was like pretty interesting yeah you know I was pretty interested in it and um I you know really early on I looked at day trading and and the markets and I saw it as buying stocks or selling stocks and and fortunately I think I was smart enough to say that's not what I'm gonna do and that's not what I can do and and I could probably teach myself or learn but that I don't even want to take the time to do that um so i bought and held and i'm i'm a pretty persistent um hodler of bitcoin and um i uh but where i got myself involved more actively was in the mining side of things so yep um so we've talked about it a lot i've i've mined bitcoin and litecoin and um I've done it for a little while now and, um, it's, it's, it's paid off well at times and,

and they've, uh, it's, it's been a struggle at other times. And it's, I think ultimately it's taught me a lot about, um, the space cause it's kept me engaged in the space as opposed to just, you know, hiding my keys and forgetting about it and then checking the price six months later. Um, so it's kept me engaged. It's helped me network, um, and build relationships like the one that we have and and other relationships that i have and and ultimately for me my involvement in the crypto space has the potential for anything other than just you know my specific investment in in bitcoin but um the potential to work with companies in the crypto space as they become bigger and have marketing needs or or want to be involved and have you know advisors or whatever

maybe in their companies and so when you first saw mining like what caught your attention about it right because it's not like um probably anything else that uh that you've seen and also uh it takes a little bit more sophistication to like buy the hardware how do i actually set this up how do i monitor it or kind of you know make sure that it's working correctly um that's not like hey i just signed up for a coinbase account and i just you know let it let a market right or to rip um and just bought some bitcoin yeah so what was kind of the thing that drew you into the mining side and then um you know did you have technical background in terms of understanding some stuff or did you have to really go kind of learn how to how to set it up um i'm not i'm i

didn't have a ton of technical background i'm not a total computer nerd although in high school um i was a teacher's assistant um to the it director at my high school and one of the jobs that i did for most of the time that i was a ta was um help set up the networks at our uh at our school so um as of you know for a teenager having a very basic understanding of of how computers are connected and how they operate um on a network i've had a like a very surface level understanding um but i think the reason that i was attracted to mining was because it seemed it seemed tangible and mechanical to me in a way that i understand how things work It seemed like it was something that I could understand how it worked, even though computers can be confusing and networks can be confusing, the operations of computer performance and power usage and the fluctuation of price and the flow of production, that seemed very, I don't know, it seemed like I could identify with that.

And also it seemed like to me Bitcoin mining was a – it's a blue-collar gig, you know, in a lot of ways. And I kind of identify with that too. So I felt like that was something where I was – I could be involved in that and that could be where I get – like I said, I'm hooked into the space but I'm not necessarily over my head. Yeah, for sure. And so as you look at it in terms of the intersection of racing and crypto, there's obviously the sponsorship angle, right? So there's plenty of crypto companies that would love to sponsor either race cars or drivers or whatever. Are there other elements of either things that NASCAR is doing today or things you can do in the future where you see some sort of intersection with the currencies or applications of blockchain technology? Or do you think it's more of, yeah, it's probably going to stick in the sponsorship area for a while.

And then maybe down the road that could happen, but probably not likely in the short term. I mean, yeah, so obviously right now sponsorship is a perfect avenue for that. And that's, you know, no different than it's a great idea for crypto companies to be involved in any sports league or any influencer. You know, NASCAR, from a sponsorship perspective, I will say that I feel like NASCAR shares a lot of the same core values that people in the cryptocurrency world share. So as these crypto companies mature to the point that they're ready to market to the masses, I think that our demographic is a very similar demographic as far as, like I said, this sort of financial sovereignty and the belief system. So that's why my network in the crypto space is important to me because I think that the opportunity will present itself eventually. um as far as an actual use case in our sport i've i've had my mind has gone a different million different directions and and really i would love to feel the ideas from anybody that sees

opportunities you and i have a lot of conversations that um you know one example could be the fractional ownership side of things and that doesn't necessarily have to be limited to just a driver right in a driver contract we've talked about basketball players um that that or what's the name of the basketball spencer dinwiddie that's right spencer dinwiddie i mean he's his attempt at tokenizing his contract um it sounds genius and it sounds um you know groundbreaking but it's really just another version of what a lot of people are already doing behind the scenes You know, golfers have staked themselves with investors, race car drivers have staked themselves with investors. I think the blockchain provides just a technology that can more cleanly define what those investments look like,

but then also open it up to a mass audience. So I think you could see race car drivers doing that. I think that you could also see race teams doing something like that. So in NASCAR, I mean, obviously we would have to have permission from the sanctioning body because the sanctioning body needs to know who owns what. But we are not totally a franchise business like the NFL or NBA. I mean, the drivers are still independent contractors. There's no union. The race teams ultimately are employers and independent organizations.

So there's a lot of assets in the racing industry that can be tokenized, if that's a fair thing to say. Well, and I think to me it's, hey, you could tokenize the contracts of the drivers, right? You could tokenize the ownership of the teams. Yeah, there's even things that you can do around – similar to how people are doing like supply chain logistics, et cetera. You can do it with the parts. And I think – so we have – and this is – NASCAR is not totally unique, but we're an ecosystem that does business with itself, right? And in a lot of different ways. So there's a lot of money that is in NASCAR that stays in NASCAR that's totally endemic

to NASCAR, right? You have money changing hands from NASCAR to the team owners, going from the team owners to the drivers, going back into NASCAR, you know, money coming from the race fans. Let's say that's money outside of NASCAR going into the racetracks and the racetracks, you know, that money going to NASCAR in different forms. So there's even, I mean, there's tons of opportunity for payment systems, right? I was just going to say, that's the holy grail is to get NASCAR to accept Bitcoin. Yeah, well, I mean, you talk about Litecoin and Align payment systems and what they're doing with the Miami Dolphins and all the different services out there that have, over the last few years, have really figured out efficient ways to settle payments in cryptocurrency.

I give me a call and I'll take you straight to the people in NASCAR that that can make those decisions because um that's not unrealistic at all you know but taking it a step further I don't think I don't see why you know a an industry like NASCAR couldn't have a native payment system you know or a native um currency of its own loyalty all that kind of stuff for sure um all right Before we finish up, I want to ask you what I think of as frequently asked questions that I've always had in my head for NASCAR drivers. For sure. What do I do when I have to go pee? That's actually one of the questions.

And so just so people at home know, we did not prepare this. He has no clue any of the questions I'm going to ask him. But the first question is, what do you do when you're racing and you've got to pee? I always turn that one around. I'm going to make this one quick. I'm going to turn that one around on you. um pump global new sponsor of mine funding morgan creek digital is on the hood of the car it's a multi-million dollar investment yep we're we're uh we're in the top 10 of the daytona 500

and there's there's 20 laps to go in the race you're on the edge of your seat on my pit box and i come over the radio and i say that i have to go pee yep not happening what do you want me to do keep driving man there you go pee in your pants yep and that's just it you got it there's no special systems there's no anything no nothing fancy now i will tell you that i have only i have only had to pee my pants in a race car one time once ever yeah wow you've been a lot of race cars yeah so the races are four hours you know if you're smart you can hold it yeah and really my thought process there is uh as uh well don't overthink it so second question and then we'll go back to the first question is uh are race drivers professional athletes yeah absolutely

yeah i tend to think that actually people don't understand how difficult it is both from a physical exertion standpoint and the toll your body takes um and then also uh the sitting there um going you know 200 miles an hour right holding the steering wheel yeah holding the car yeah i mean you're holding a 3 000 pound car and um i mean so i wear a heart rate monitor in the car um i track my biometrics and um my one of my hobbies so my hobbies outside of racing are endurance sports but it's not just a hobby because i feel like it it helps my sport you know it's it's an investment that i make in in my craft to compete in endurance sports and my heart rate in a four-hour nascar race is actually you could almost overlay it on my heart rate on a four-hour

a half Ironman triathlon. Wow. So it's a very, and it's kind of the same to a marathon. It's very close to a marathon heart rate over a four hour marathon. That's crazy. Yeah. So it's I think I posted on social media, one of the hotter races we had this summer, my average heart rate was like 145 for a three hour race. Holy shit. So the reason why I asked that is as an athlete, you've got to stay uh hydrated yeah so you're drinking a bunch of fluids and anyone who's played sports before finding the balance between staying hydrated and not having to pee all the time yeah yeah yeah is a balance um so we lose about 15 pounds of fluids in a race um i'm able typically on a on a race where i'm gonna lose that many fluids i'm able to replace about 120 ounces

in the car got it um i don't draw i don't drink while i'm racing but when there's breaks when there's caution periods um i'll suck down a 20 24 ounce bottle like it's nothing and i usually drink about you know five or six of those in a race okay so uh next question do you bring your cell phone in the car during the race not allowed to not allowed to okay so there's no texting and driving during the race yeah uh cell phones have accelerometers in them and we're not allowed to have accelerometers in the in the car why not uh nascar has limitations on on the data that you're allowed to collect in the car on a race weekend so in testing environments um it's pretty much wide open our cars are outfitted with hundreds of thousands of dollars of instrumentation

but on a race weekend it's there's a lot of data collection in our car but it's all sort of funneled through nascar got it what what is um what do you bring in the car with you for the race so obviously you bring some fluids are there other things that you bring that maybe people wouldn't think about um or is it just pretty much fluid and then you get in your fire retardant no i have let's get racing yeah i mean my fire suit uh shoes gloves helmet head and neck restraints uh i have a a carbon fiber bottle cage like you have on your bike if you're a road cyclist or something like that and um and i drink out of um a 24 ounce bottle and i i do that instead of a camelback or like a mechanical system um or um because i like to keep track of how much i'm

drinking so i have that right by the window of my car when i come in for a pit stop there's a in a pit stop you see the guys that run around the car there's one guy that's actually dedicated to the driver his job is to get me whatever i need so if i wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich i'd ask him for one um but i have them put my drink mix in there and then he'll pull a tear off off the windshield to clean to give me a fresh windshield very cool um what's the scariest situation you've ever been in racing um it's uh usually i don't typically get scared and behind the wheel um i'm pretty used to it uh to the to the fear factor of it all um but usually the the couple tenths of a second between uh when your tire blows out and you're headed straight to the

wall is about the scariest have you had that happen yeah i had it happen a couple months ago So I blew a tire at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and hit the wall at about 160 miles an hour. Holy shit. And, yeah, it was a pretty bad wreck. It was like a 35G hit. So if you could imagine a 160-pound body turning into a, you know, multiply that by 35. Yeah. That's how much of a hammer that my body was going into the wall.

Dang. It didn't feel good. I was sore for a while. did like like what when you got out of the car was it something where you were like hey i got pretty messed up there or yeah i mean it well so you go to the infield care center you see the doctors um i have to take a concussion test unfortunately i did not have a concussion um but my i had a lot of bruising on my body um i had some some rashes from like where the seat belts um you could if you know i wear what's called a nine point harness so there's nine

points of anchoring on my seatbelts uh you could see the outline on my body in bruising where my seatbelts are where they line up so it kind of did its job though it did its job for sure um but i was very sore i see um excuse me i see a physical therapist every monday after a race whether i need it or not um 7 a.m every every monday and we just go through my body and my mobility and And that's kind of what kicks me off for my training week so that I'm ready to train. After a wreck like that, I saw my physical therapist every day that week, and I didn't train at all. Yeah, yeah. You're talking about Epsom salt baths and recovery.

For sure. Is rubbing racing? Rubbing is definitely racing. Yeah? Yeah. What is the culture within drivers around this, right? Because I think most people, they don't get to see kind of the driver's perspective. And so it looks like there's a lot of jockeying and there's a lot of intentional kind of rubbing or bumping or whatever.

Yeah, NASCAR is a very physical sport when it comes to the cars and drivers. I feel like for the most part, you know, we get along as drivers off the track. We're pretty intense with each other on the track. There's a lot of mutual respect, especially at the top level in the Cup Series. The drivers have a lot of respect for each other, but we race each other really, really hard. and um we have a lot of different ways that we communicate with each other on the racetrack based on how you race the other drivers you can it's there's a way to send messages and a way to like what give me some examples well the one of the most useful tools to send a message to another

driver is to stick your middle finger out the window so the bird really said the bird goes a long ways and it can say a lot of things um and and really the um that is amazing the vigor in which you that you send the bird um can send a lot of messages too you know are you shaking your hand is it a soft bird do you just um and i'm not joking yeah oh i'm sure there's a but also i mean you use your car i mean it's it's when the caution comes out coming pulling up alongside of somebody and and bumping them uh you know can send the message that that you didn't like what they did um you know sometimes drivers will pull up to you and they'll try to cut your tire uh i mean it's they you know our cars have sharp edges on them and they want to rub against you and they

might cut your tire they might you know rub rub on your car and put some damage on your car that can hurt your performance um if they don't like what you did i mean that's that's that's the gritty part of NASCAR racing. That's an elite level to, to use the car to pop your tire is an elite level of being able to drive going, you know, even 50 miles an hour, let alone 200. Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, you know, I, um, I've gotten, I'm not someone that likes to wreck other people because I don't want to get wrecked. Right. And you know, that's true. That's true. Crypto trading as well. Yeah, for sure. And so, you know, when you're, uh, when you're, when you're in a typical fight with another driver i mean um the best way to get your shit piled up is to just start wrecking people

but um sometimes you know for me the best way to send the message or at least get what i wanted to get out of it is just put damage on their car like i'm not gonna wreck you but i'll damage your car you know because it's gonna screw up your performance your team's not gonna like it your car owner is gonna cost him money and you know it's like hey if you're gonna screw with me i'll just damage your car yeah and and there's ways that you can do it without hurting your own car. And that's, uh, that's, there's, that's one of the ways I guess that drivers communicate with each other, but the bird is always a good place to start. Don't, uh, don't tell anybody how to do it. We don't need on the LA freeway. Um, what's the last question. And then, uh, we'll

talk about some aliens, but, uh, what, um, what's the craziest thing you've done to train for driving man i mean it's i have spent hours and hours behind the wheel of race cars and and in the simulator um you know our simulation tools are actually not necessarily driver training tools as they are engineering tools but um when i worked for hendrick motorsports i mean i've been in the car for six seven hours straight without getting out you know because because we were at a test and we had a test plan and we had to get everything done and we were beating the daylight and um you know those are those are the tests where you're just you have to you you're putting your life on the line lap after lap after lap you have a you know several hundred thousand dollar race car with

that much more money invested in the instruments that are on it and you're driving at 200 miles an hour and you have to to do that all day long and and it's all for the greater good of building faster race cars so i love it i just feel like yeah i feel like just the business itself is the craziest thing you could do i mean i've been grinding at this for a long long time for sure um before you could ask me a question aliens real or not um i think i probably listened to the joe rogan experience too much to uh to not believe in aliens so i yeah i think aliens are real or i think there's something i think there's something living out there um do you think they've ever been to earth if there's any but there's been contact i don't know you know i think that

in in my capitalist belief um and and the uh the um maybe not capital maybe that's the wrong word to use what am i trying to say what are we as human what what like sentient beings yeah i i think we're definitely capitalists yeah we're definitely i i guess that like in in the way intelligent life form in our in our nature as humans it's it's hard not to you know it's hard hard not to think that if aliens were here for me that that they would have taken us over if they were more powerful than us right so i i just i don't know i have a hard time believing that there's aliens out there that are just watching us and yeah i feel like like if they had the technology to know about us and we didn't know about them then we probably wouldn't be in existence

I feel like they might just be watching and be like, look at these idiots. Look at all this dumb stuff they're doing. I can see that maybe there's life forms out there that we're more advanced than, that we just haven't found yet, and they haven't found us. If they were watching, they'd be like, look at this. Every Sunday they show up and they just drive around in a circle. Yeah, exactly. Awesome, man.

Well, to finish up, what one question do you have for me? One question that I have for you. Oh, my gosh. how i mean how long is this journey for you how long is this this crypto journey oh people people already know uh are you a crypto lifer is there an exit someday is there a yeah look uh so there's two separate things one is um the technology the assets etc and then the other is like what i always call like the media stuff so there's twitter writing every day the podcast On the media side, one day I'm going to wake up and I'm just going to say, it was a fun ride, but I'll see you guys later.

Yeah, yeah, I could see that. And you may never hear from me again. What are you reading right now? Reading? I'm actually reading Edward Snowden's Permanent Record. Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, so that one's pretty good. I just finished recently Steve Schwartzman.

I think Whatever It Takes is what it's called. That was pretty good. But to me, it's just the media stuff is fun and it's a way to kind of collect thoughts, talk to people. stuff but uh it could be draining and uh at some point i think i'll just be like all right see you yeah um and it'll free up a lot of time right it allowed me to go read more it allowed me to kind of do other things but uh but for right now i'm having fun so uh we'll keep with that and then on the investing side i i don't think that i could uh ever walk away so we'll we'll see what happens there nice nice awesome man all right well i appreciate you doing this where can people find

uh find you online or find out more information if they want to get in contact with you i'm on Twitter, Landon Castle, at Landon Castle, L-A-N-D-O-N-C-A-S-S-I-L-L, and my DMs are open. That's like Mississippi when you're a little kid and you learn how to say M-I-S-S-I-L-L. Yeah. And I'm on Instagram as well. But Crypto Twitter can find me on Twitter. All right, man. I appreciate you doing this. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see

the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain